Q.E.D. A deeply cynical enterprise, this book. But then, so is American politics, all the more reason this will doubtless...
Talking points, on-message admonitions and Machiavellian strategies for would-be presidents.
One of Bush brain Karl Rove’s great insights as a political strategist was that this hearts-and-minds stuff is for conquered Third World countries; in America, the object is “to get 50 percent plus one.” So it was in 2004, give or take. And so it was, give or take, in 2000. Perhaps that’s the way it will be in 2008, though ABC news producer Halperin and Washington Post political editor Harris (The Survivor, 2005) remark that this will depend on which vision of politics prevails: the inclusive, governing-from-the-center Clinton doctrine, or the exclusive, appealing-to-the-base Bush doctrine. Either way, the authors hold, most of the old rules won’t count; we are in a time of noise and what they call the Freak Show, when New Media outlets such as blogs—which overwhelmingly favor the technologically savvy right wing—have far more authority and audience than the Old Media of Dan Rather and company. Given that the predominant mode of the Freak Show is attack-and-smear—attack and smear the non-Republican candidate, that is—then it’s small wonder that John Kerry was swiftboated in 2004; still, the authors write, he should have seen it coming, and he should have known a grand Machiavellian principle: You wanna be in charge, you gotta control your narrative. Halperin and Harris digest a couple of score of these non-bulleted bullet points, all of which seem perfectly sensible—for instance, “Being kind to those on your own team allows you to conserve your brutish tendencies to destroy political adversaries” and “Think ruthlessly and systematically about the Electoral College—only losers let their minds wander elsewhere.”
Q.E.D. A deeply cynical enterprise, this book. But then, so is American politics, all the more reason this will doubtless wind up on the nightstands of candidates everywhere.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6447-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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